Hi folks. I would appreciate some assistance. This mark is on the bottom of a 19" bronze tiger. If anyone can help me identify the maker, I would be thrilled! Thanks in advance! Please click on the URL - it will work for the picture.

Hi Fritchie! Thanks for looking. Here are three more pics - two of the piece and one more of the mark. I've been told it is of the Meiji period, but I don't know anything more than that (if I even know that much). Thanks!!

I read Japanese at maybe a fourth or fifth grade level, and I think there are two characters, but it`s very hard to read these due to shadow. I`m sort of inclined to think you should rotate the photos clockwise, and the characters would read vertically. My best guess, is that it reads, "房車" (Can you see those characters? If so, is it close?) If so, the first character "bou" or "fusa" and the second "sha" or "kuruma"(vehicle, car). I googled these in Japanese and came back with a lot of hits in industry.

The stroke order and writing style for many characters changes constantly which makes it harder to read.

If it is Japanese, and if you can copy the mark very carefully in black marker or something on a piece of paper and post an image of that, it would help.

I did a little googling, and got a lot of hits in automotive and manufacturing （maybe just because of the "sha"); without being sure what the kanji actually are, it`s guesswork. Here are several ways to write tiger in Japanese, btw "虎", "寅”, "トラ","とら".

The second character is 華, right? It can be read as "hana" (meaning flower), "ka", "ke" or "ge" depending on the word or name. It`s fairly common actually.

The first character is not modern Japanese, or more accurately, it`s not a modern font. It`s probably similar to the current way that the character is written, but the stroke order is different, making it basically impossible for me to look up. But I`d bet any native Japanese would be able to read it (or at least look it up) immediately. I`ll show it to someone and see if I can get a definitive answer tomorrow...now I`m curious.

I asked four people today, all Japanese sculptors/grad students or recent grads in metal, wood and restoration.

The consensus is that the second character is 章 (pronounced "shou", meaning chapter).

The first character left them scratching their heads. Their best guess was that it was either 羅 （pronounced "ra") or 罷 (pronounced "he" or "heguma", meaning brown bear).

There was a consensus that it was a name...but they didn`t know it. There was a consensus that it was old, and Meiji-era sounded reasonable. But there was a creeping suspicion that it was the Chinese writing of the character. (Japanese characters are based on Chinese, but have evolved in a slightly different way. As if you tried to read German in cursive (though the grammar is completely unrelated).